


Comfort Food

by motleyfam



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Broken Bones, Bruce Wayne Is Trying His Best, Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Food Issues, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt Dick Grayson, Minor Injuries, Young Dick Grayson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-21 13:07:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30022230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/motleyfam/pseuds/motleyfam
Summary: Dick is convinced that food always tastes better after a show.
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Bruce Wayne
Comments: 17
Kudos: 71





	Comfort Food

Dick is convinced that food always tastes better after a show.

His dad laughs and tells him it’s just because they’re acrobats and they can’t eat much prior to spending a few hours intricately twisting and flipping their bodies through the air over the dizzying roar of the crowds below. Hunger, he tells his son, has always been the best spice. But Dick thinks there’s more to it than that. There’s something about the _buzz_ —the energy following a performance—that makes even the simplest of dishes special _._

With so many different cultures and nationalities represented at Haly’s, Dick is used to eating all sorts of things, learns to tell who’s making dinner each night by the aroma of the various herbs and spices wafting out from the tent. There’s a Russian acrobat and a Taiwanese contortionist and a French wire walker and a clown from Cleveland, and the only common factor seems to be their insistence that the nine-year-old could use some more meat on his bones. He helps his mother stir cornmeal porridge and stuff cabbage leaves with ground meat and rice while his dad, grinning, juggles bell peppers and onions and cans of tomato paste in an arc above their heads.

It’s always late at night by the time they gather around the plastic folding tables with full plates, aching muscles, and weary smiles. Snippets from conversations in two or three different languages wash over Dick, and he doesn’t understand everything, but he doesn’t mind it either. The food and laughter warm him from the inside out, and he eats until his belly is full and his eyelids start to grow heavy. His mother pulls him into her lap and lets him curl up against her chest, and he’s lulled to sleep by the hum of the troop members’ voices, perfectly safe and content.

\-----

The night that Dick’s parents fall to their deaths, there’s beef goulash simmering on the cookhouse stove and just the smell is enough to make him sick.

\-----

Dick doesn’t eat much during his first few weeks at the Manor. 

Bruce sighs and Alfred frets, but the social worker tells them a decreased appetite is fairly normal following a traumatic event and as long as Dick keeps trying to eat, it should come back with time. He’s otherwise a very active and mostly-happy child—doing flips down the halls and exploring the grounds and sliding down the banisters—so they keep offering food, but not really pushing it, hoping that once the grief stops being so fresh, he’ll come around.

Dick lets them believe that that’s the problem, and that’s part of it, sure. It _is_ hard to eat when he’s sad—when the _missing them_ settles like a weight in his chest, sinking down until it fills him up to the point that there’s no room inside for anything else. But that’s not all the time—only on the really bad days. 

Most of the time when Dick struggles to eat, it’s because the food is just so _cold._

But that’s silly—of course it’s not cold. He can see the steam rising from the plates as he sits at the end of the long oak table, tasting rosemary and thyme on Alfred’s lamb chops instead of paprika and garlic and hearing only the subdued _clink_ of silverware on china instead of conversation and laughter.

Some foods are easier than others. Potato chips taste exactly the same as they did at the circus, as do fruit snacks and dry cereal and string cheese and Oreos, so that’s what Dick eats. Alfred frowns and tisks his tongue and lectures him on the importance of proper nutrition, but Bruce doesn’t mind. He says anything is better than nothing, and he’d rather see Dick happy and fed than hungry and sad.

Then one day, when Dick is racing through the Manor, possibly a bit sugar high on the package of Swedish Fish he just scarfed down in lieu of the sandwich Alfred made him for lunch, he doesn't want to think about how much he's missing his parents, so he starts thinking about how much he misses _flying_ instead.

And then there’s a hundred-thousand dollar chandelier shattered on the ground, and a crying nine-year-old with a mangled arm and an aching hip and _so, so many cuts_ that Bruce looks about as terrified as Dick’s ever seen him.

\-----

It looks worse than it is. A mere three hours later, Dick is walking back out across the hospital parking lot with a bright blue cast on his arm to match the dark blue bruise on his hip, and bandages and a few stitches on a cut above his eye that really, they could have fixed themselves. And Bruce has been... just so kind and attentive and worried and _parental_ that for just a moment Dick forgets himself as he looks up with big eyes and asks:

“Do you think we can get ice cream?”

It's the first time that Dick’s asked for food since arriving at the Manor, and Bruce is so visibly shocked that he agrees immediately. He drives them to the nearest Dairy Queen and orders a sundae bigger than the boy’s head—just as Dick’s dad had done for him two years ago when Dick broke his collarbone backflipping off a trampoline. They get two red plastic spoons and a stack of napkins and sit down at the umbrella-covered concrete table outside. It’s mid-April and the spring breeze is chilly and the ice cream is cold, and Dick is shivering just a tad, so Bruce ever-so-carefully wraps an arm around the injured boy, pulling him into his side.

And for the first time since that horrible night, Dick feels warm.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a tumblr if you'd ever like to chat: [motleyfam](https://motleyfam.tumblr.com/)


End file.
